


territorial animals

by lemonbalmlemonverbena



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Domestic Fluff, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-17
Updated: 2018-08-20
Packaged: 2019-06-28 16:15:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,089
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15710775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lemonbalmlemonverbena/pseuds/lemonbalmlemonverbena
Summary: UPDATED with surprise sequel chapter~~~~Sandor-typical profanity, explicit references to Sansa and Sandor's sex life; show canon, I’d say, with some book-only details sprinkled in.I just read @redcandle17's Three's Company (https://archiveofourown.org/works/63554) and it reminded me of a head canon I've been living with for a while, so I decided just to put down for you all.Set during the Great War; a sleepy little slice of life for Winterfell's resident pack of dire wolves and dogs--fluff about fluffs.{{Comments feed the writer.}}





	1. in winter, we must protect ourselves

_Was it a rat?_

_A cat? The brother’s red-eyed wolf?_

_What in bloody hell was scratching at the door?_

One of Sansa’s three black dogs raised her head, yapped a quick bark, and then put her head back down on the colorful rag rug Sansa had knotted together to keep the chill off their bellies on these long nights. Another one of the dogs shifted away from the hearth edge as a log cracked and popped, and then she rolled on her back, as if seeking belly scratches in her sleep.

His swords were leaning in the corner beside the bed, but if he wanted to snatch them up he’d have to wake the red-haired girl who had her arm and leg thrown over him. The well-honed dagger in reach would have to do for the moments between when the marauder entered, proving the need to shove her off him because barring _proof_ of imminent danger, he was loath to rouse her. She was warm against him, and he liked the tickle of her hair spread over his bicep and forearm. He palmed the knife and lay still--no use alerting the intruder to his wakefulness.

A click? Yes, the door opening, without so much as a creak. He craned his neck toward the door and then put the knife back on the shelf beside the bed.

_Arya._

He grunted in the direction of the door, and Sansa mumbled into his chest, her sweet breath rustling the swirls of curly hair around his nipples: “What is it?”

“It’s no one,” he whispered to the top of her head, hoping she’d trust him and simply drop back to sleep.

Arya didn’t cooperate.

“It’s me,” she said, loudly, as she kicked off her boots near the door and bounded toward their bed. She was dressed like a boy, as usual, wearing a knit tunic and trousers.

He couldn’t see the color well with the backlight of the fire behind her, but he suspected they were the same bedclothes he was supposed to wear but hardly ever did--in the same fabric but a much smaller size--made for them both by the Lady of the house herself.

“My fire went out, scoot over,” said Arya as she clambered into bed. Sansa was awake then--her hair snapped against his face as she whipped her head toward  her sister: “It’s _our_ bed--why don’t _you_ scoot over? We’re married, you know; you can’t be in here now.”

“I’m cold,” stated Arya flatly, clearly feeling _more_ than entitled to any space she saw fit to occupy in the Lord’s Chamber at Winterfell.

He thought he heard Sansa hiss in reply, but she would never, in a hundred hundred years, ever do such a thing, and then his wife was climbing over him, knobby knees and hands pressing into him as casually as if she were climbing over a boulder on the edge of a river. He chuckled to himself darkly, _My brother’s dead, and I inherited the title of Mountain._

On the other edge of the bed, Arya yanked all the blankets toward her and tucked the edges under her feet so she was cozy.

“Comfortable?” he snarked.

“I’m still freezing,” groused the wolf-girl and he knew that much was true. He could hear her teeth chattering. In a small fury, Sansa wrenched open her wardrobe doors and found a clean bedshift. She slithered into it like a barncat slips into a farm kitchen, sinuous and smooth, hoping not to be noticed. The thing was lavender with embroidered diamonds in clusters of four, and he suddenly had a vision of her as she was in the Red Keep the night Stannis landed.

Sansa picked his discarded breeches off the floor and threw them at him. He didn’t catch them because he was enjoying the show too much to bother. Maybe she’d been having a good dream when her sister woke her, maybe she resented having so few spaces of her own in a keep that in so many ways belonged to the whole North, but whatever the proximate cause, she was irritable as hell.

He tried not to smile too broadly.

He _adored_ angry Sansa.

He hadn’t understood when he’d known her in King’s Landing that her anger and her irritation were a gift of sorts--she only shared them with those she trusted. She argued with her brother, she criticized her sister, she disciplined her dogs, she cut _him_ down to size when she was tired of his whinging and complaints about her devotion to her people when she _could_ be sitting on his lap, smallclothes on the floor, legs wrapped around his hips, while he nuzzled her neck and plucked at her nipples. Everyone else got courtesy and protocol and propriety and gentility and hardly ever a glimpse of the wolf he knew her to be.

Sansa knelt down before their hearth and stirred the embers, before hoisting one, two, three more heavy knots of firewood atop the ashes that had accumulated since they’d retired to their chambers after supper. She’d drank Dornish sour out of his cup all night at the high table, and when he finally got her alone she’d been wildly hungry for him, pulling his cock out of his breeches almost as soon as he’d closed the door behind them.

He usually made a point to bolt the door three ways before they fell into bed for good, but she’d had her way with him so completely this evening that he’d simply forgotten. Thankfully it was only Arya who barged in, but tomorrow it might but someone else, someone with darker intentions toward his wife.

“Bar the door while you’re up, woman,” he told Sansa, trying to speak gently so as to not exacerbate her ire.

“Indeed,” she said through gritted teeth. That was for Arya, not for him. “Put on your trousers, we have guests.”

He did as he was told, not that Arya gave two shits about his cock _or_ her sister’s tits, and then he exhaled and felt his shoulders drop as Sansa threw the bolts.

The fire began to blaze high as Sansa opened a chest at the foot of the bed and pulled out an armful of fur. She threw the skins atop the pile of bedding that Arya had claimed for herself, and then in an another unladylike clambering expedition, climbed over the chest and over the footboard of the bed and back between him and Arya, reclaiming her place under his own arm. Sansa snatched back the bedding they’d started the night with, and made sure it was pulled snug around _him_. A vision flickered behind his eyes of what she’d be like as a mother--so gentle and loving and warm--even as he felt the sisters kick at each other.

“Knock it off,” he growled, as he turned on his side away from both of them. He heard Sansa grunt, improbably. _Hissing and grunting in one night? She was hung over on Dornish sour, that was the only explanation._

And then her arm snaked around him pulling him close to her, and he felt her tits pressed into his back. He tangled his arm with hers and pulled her closer; she was so little compared to him that her hips cradling his ass and her legs behind his meant her arm was still just barely above his waist and her face was somewhere below his shoulder blades.

 _Sweet little thing._ He felt her nuzzle him and sigh as she settled back into a drowse behind him.

He wondered, idly, if he would ever have the balls to say the word _love_ to her. He doubted it. He’d rather be burned again than feel that he’d obliged her into making some empty reciprocal gesture, and yet...he couldn’t bear the thought of her not knowing the words for how he felt about her.

_Never mind, dog, just keep fucking the feelings into her and leave it at that._

* * *

There wasn’t any such thing as daybreak anymore. The days never broke during the Long Night, the sun never rose, there was never a glimmer of pink on the horizon as the stars ducked away, it was only ever darkness broken up by mere gentle mists and vicious ice storms where the cold stabbed and bit like steel itself.

And yet, after a lifetime of work on a soldier’s regimen, Sandor knew it was morning. If nothing else, he had to relieve himself badly enough to make it necessary to climb out of the soft bed and let his feet lead him across the hard stone floor to the chamberpot. He wasn’t sure he even wanted to open his eyes yet. He yawned, and unlaced his breeches and as he pulled out his cock for a proper piss, he thought he might like to go back to bed for a while, if he didn’t know better.

His bird was ever so easy in the morning. She always muttered that his beard tickled her as he pushed her hair off her neck and kissed down her spine, and quietly hummed her approval when he petted her pussy and slid in a finger or two before he thrust his cock inside her and made good use of his morning wood.

In the beginning he’d made grand efforts to please her at all hours and then one day she taken hold of his face with both her tiny hands and told him she was a busy woman and to please use her as a wife was meant to be used by her husband and let her get on with her day. He’d made gallant statements about her nobility and grace and how she wasn’t a whore or a barnyard animal, to which fevered promises of devotion she’d merely raised an eyebrow. She then firmly reminded him of their wedding vows and how she was his as he was hers and _she didn’t want to debate it anymore_. And then he fucked her hard and fast, and after he was done she stood and dressed and preened in the glass and kissed him goodbye without another word between them, and she marched off to oversee some nonsense with the builders at the Library Tower.

Most days after that he just used her in the mornings like some bed slave and somehow she loved him all the more for it.

As he shook the last droplets of piss off his cock, he remembered he’d have no such easy pleasure this morning--Sansa was in a mood last night, and Arya was still in their bed. _Oh well._

He saw that there was a glassine layer of ice atop the water in the washbasin. _Refreshing_ , he told himself as he cracked the ice, quietly, with his fingers--the frigid water was so cold it almost felt like a different kind of burn--and then he cleaned up and splashed water on his face and he was bloody well awake.

Then, eyes finally open and ready to take in the day, he wandered back to the bed. _Oh, they_ are _sisters, although you’d never know it if you didn’t know it._

In the night the girls had found their peace. They slept mirroring each other, one hand tucked under a cheek, the other outstretched, their mismatched hair spread out behind them, limbs curled up tight for warmth.

 _My girls. Mine. They belong to_ me _and no one else, at least not until Sansa starts whelping pups and I have to share her, and Arya finds some mangy worthless mate I’ll be forced to endure._

_Mine._

_Very well, mine and bloody Ned Stark’s. And Jon Snow’s. And the dogs. And the voice from the chair, the stranger on whom Sansa still doted as if he were truly her own blood._

_MINE._

Watching them sleep together, safe and trusting and unafraid in their slumber, he got that strange sick feeling that came over him when he imagined revisiting his days without them. He wouldn’t be able to do it again, not after truly having them. He just wouldn’t survive it a second time, and if his nightmares of such a thing ever did come to pass, he wouldn’t depend on the whimsy of a spiteful little wolf bitch to end him, either.

And then one of Sansa’s black dogs--Tansy, Kyra? No, that was probably Grey Jeyne--pulled up into a stretch, yawning and arching her back down and kicking out her legs and looking up at him eagerly, tongue lolling out the side of her mouth. She sat and wagged her tail pleasingly. She wanted him, too--well, she wanted him to take her for a walk and feed her. He’d always done better with dogs than with people, it wasn’t such a change, but after long enough with Sansa these were _his_ dogs, too, not just some slum mongrel who appreciated the bones thrown him.

No, they loved him and trusted him and relied on him and believed in him. The dogs loved him, and the Stark girls loved him, and the serving wenches in the hall loved flirting with him, which made Sansa flare, which made him _laugh,_ long and deep, because didn’t she bloody well know he knew the difference between his queen and any other woman in the world?

Was this how it felt to have a family? Was this what it meant to have people, to have kin, to be more than a faceless slave to people who didn’t give a shit if you lived or died? He wasn’t sure how to measure his place with all of these people, he only knew that while he’d always been ready to die for his masters, he’d never wanted to live for anyone before. Not until he met his sweet bird and her obnoxious little sister.

If they survived this war, he thought, he’d give every measure of his strength and vigor and patience and wits to this wife he’d improbably won, and to their babies, and maybe, if the gods were very very kind indeed, to their babies after them.

But first, Grey Jeyne was whining, and it was time to take the dogs out. When he came back the keep would be astir and Sansa would kiss him on the jaw and then stand on her tiptoes to kiss his cheek, too. She’d be cheery and wish him good morning and smile at him brilliantly, and then bustle off to mother every damn vassal in the North from the newborns to the wizened widows, and all their goats and horses and chickens, too.

He pulled on his old boots and shrugged into the great bearskin cloak Sansa gave him when she’d first found him amidst her brother’s host, and threw back the bolts on the door quietly and gestured for Grey Jeyne to come. She did, and Kyra sat up, eager, and Tansy opened her eyes and lifted her head and yawned and then plopped it back down.

“Come on, girls. You’re with me. Let’s go,” and then they all three were up and slipping through his legs in a blur of glossy black, and he tried not to linger too long at the door looking back at Sansa and Arya in the bed.

He wanted to go back to their sleepy warmth and steal them into his arms but there was nowhere to steal them to now. They were home.


	2. Sansa gets a say

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I re-read Three’s Company and then I felt bad that Arya and Sandor got POVs but Sansa was left out and here we are. 
> 
> You might hate her after this IDK.

Colder.

Not cold, but colder.

Her Hound’s body was a blast furnace unto itself, so that even in darkest of winter—when blizzard after blizzard after blizzard, without relief, swept over the North—she was nearly always damp with the sweaty heat of exerted bodies when she was anywhere near him.

She was tucked under him now—she could smell the vinegary smell of his armpits that had become so favored by her nose—so she was warm as any woman could hope to be under the seasonal conditions, but also she felt colder. Her arm and shoulder and bum told her something was different, off, but she didn’t know what it was.

Did he know? Maybe he knew and could tell her.

“What is it?” she asked, so sleepy she couldn’t so much as lift her head as she murmured the words.

“It’s no one,” he rumbled, and she felt the words as much as she heard them. It felt as she were standing on a Northern lakeshore and a bank of thunder clouds in the distance was coming to visit her and the clouds were a man and a god at once and the thunder just wanted to visit so it could tell her it loved her.

“It’s me...My fire went out. Scoot over,” said Arya. _Arya._

A bolt of the purest jealousy shot through Sansa.

_You. Can’t. Have. Him._

Leave me—at least— _our marriage bed_.

She was despondent and enraged at once. She had flashes of knocking Arya onto the stone floor and bashing her face apart with a piece of firewood. She thought of putting Needle through Arya’s eyeball or her ear or her nostril and pushing it so hard that it caught her brains and killed her.

She thought of calling her an ugly desperate whore, of pushing her out the window, pushing her down the stairs, pushing her in front of a herd of stampeding horses.

Then Arya would be dead and smeared on the ground and dead smeared Arya couldn’t steal Sandor Clegane from her and make him smile and understand him and be his true love, loyal and devoted in all things, in this life and the next.

“It’s our bed--why don’t you scoot over? We’re married, you know; you can’t be in here now,” she said in a low tone that made her feel like one of the dogs when they cornered a heavy-tusked wild boar in the wolfswood.

As she spoke, she pulled her sticky skin away from Sandor’s just enough to realize they were both completely naked. Until her marriage she’d always slept in a nightgown but that habit was gone now. Removing clothes was a waste of time. She slept naked so she could wake up to the feeling of Sandor pinning her hands above her head so as to better tongue her nipples and bite at the swells of her breasts. (In such a position, her squirming reaction had no effect other than to inflame him further.) Or she would wake up to the feel of his erection nestling between her buttocks and he would grind into her as he pushed her hair away from her neck and kissed the skin at the back of her collarbone and she would giggle because his beard tickled her neck. (She’d squeeze her thighs together in a rhythm until one of his hands found her and relieved her.)

“I’m cold,” shrugged Arya in reply, oh so smug in the knowledge that Sandor would allow her any liberty.

As long as she’d known Arya, the rules had not applied to her. She had never had to be good, or polite, or compliant, she didn’t have to be neat or clean or dress properly or do her hair like a lady. She never submitted to any law of god or man that governed others but didn’t suit her immediate purposes. _Of course_ Arya would feel wholly entitled to come into her marriage bed and lay beside her naked husband.

“Comfortable?” said Sandor. _He flirts with her, just like he flirts with the scullions._

“I’m still freezing,” said Arya.

She chased the anger as she climbed over the naked husband in question and made her way to her wardrobe. If she didn’t stay angry she might sob instead, because of all the women in the world Arya was the most dangerous to her. Sandor loved her with all his heart and where did that leave her?

She found a lavender bedshift that would offer a modicum of modesty and found Sandor’s breeches and threw them at him. He was magnificent in the firelight, lazy and strong at once, leaning back on the pillows in front of her, one arm tucked behind his head as he watched her move. She looked away, the separation of their skin and then the added boundary of being dressed—too much.

_Arya does this. She doesn’t even mean to. She doesn’t even have to tug him away she just appears and he embraces her and lets go of me. Someday I’ll be old and ugly and even meaner than I am now, and he’ll leave with her for good because they have...sympathy. They’re just alike. They anticipate each other and act as one, and isn’t that a more perfect marriage than I could ever hope for? We’re so different, him and I. Hardly anything in our worlds overlaps, except in this room—and fine, in the godswood and in the stables and in the wine cellar._

As she exhaled her frustration, she saw her breath on the air. She put one, two, three knots of firewood into the hearth—that should do to keep them all warm and snug until morning.

“Bar the door while you’re up, woman,” he said. She felt pathetically grateful for the attention. Yes, woman. A woman and her husband. Man and wife. Father and mother grown from warrior and maiden.

“Indeed...put your trousers on. We have guests,” she said. _The guest in our bed is sister to me, and what to you? Is there a word for it? She steals into our bed and snatches the covers away, she takes faces that don’t belong to her, what else would she take? What else?_

The bedding, at least, could be reclaimed. There were extra furs packed up for just such nights. She made sure that Jon and Bran and _Arya_ and the staff and the guests and the Queen’s favored retainers all had plenty to keep them warm, but just in case, kept some back still—just in case.

She found the furs that she’d stitched together herself: one of beaver, another of fox, one from otters that swam in the Shivering Sea. They were precious and rare and blood was shed to make them so, and she would give them all to Arya and so much more if only she would only relinquish him. _He’s mine. Without him I’m lost. He’ll leave this world before me—we both know that but only he speaks of it—so I need to hoard what I can of him before that day. I’ll need to live on it for the rest of my life._

She threw all the furs into Arya’s side of the bed and then climbed over him to her place beside him but, of course, Arya’s feet were in her spot. She kicked her out of the way and then that little bitch kicked back and then Sandor growled, “Knock it off.”

He was angry. He turned away from her, facing the wall.

She grunted at Arya to convey, without words, that Arya had once again made trouble for her and it would be remembered.

_Is he very angry? He always scolds us when we fight and tells us we’re spoiled brats and that if he was a Stark he’d knock our heads together and lock us up together until we remembered we were sisters._

_Well, we are locked in together, he’s just stuck here with us._

She gingerly touched his flank, and he didn’t flinch, and then she wrapped an arm around him. He pulled her closer to him with his roughened hand, and then she was pressed into his vast back, like a continent to itself.

 _My love._ She was trapped in this nightgown, and she couldn’t feel all of him but he still had no tunic on so her face, at least, could burn from the heat of him.

He smelled right, and she could pet the coarse hair and soft skin on his hard-planed belly and petting him always soothed her ever so quickly.

*************

_If she wakes up and gets out of here before he comes back I think we have time for a quickie before I start the day. I need to be in the kitchens, and speak with Jon, and see that they aren’t squandering the burned timber from the ruins of Wintertown—there are many beams and struts that Cregan said could be salvaged, but yesterday I saw them pulling down and discarding that one crofter’s hut as a piece!_

_But if she’s gone when he comes back, I could probably entice him into something._

_It’s usually done by now._

_In the mornings, he usually takes me from behind, rough and hard until the bed squeaks under every thrust and I can’t help but squeak too, because as he hammers me the blows against my womb hurt. I feel like I might break but I never do._

_I can do anything after that was the first thing. He’s inside me then, all day long, after that, and it makes me strong._

“Morning,” came a mumble from the bed.

Sansa was standing by the window letting the cold in. It wasn’t intended to chill Arya so much that she woke up—the bracing cold sustained Sansa, because it was the feeling of home—but if that was a positive side effect, so be it.

“Good morning, Arya,” she said softly.

“Where are the dogs?” asked Arya with a yawn. She was wearing the sleep clothes Sansa had made for her. Arya’s were more worn-out that Sandor’s, since he hardly ever wore his, on account of being an ill-bred barbarian. She would have to work on a new pair for her sister soon. Maybe a moss-green this time?

“Sandor took them out already. He runs them around the walls twice at least,” she said.

“What’s wrong with you? Why do you sound sad?” asked Arya as she climbed out of bed, leaving a twisted pile of fur and blankets behind where she had slept.

Sansa approached the bed and separated out the furs one by one and began to roll them up to put away. She was already dressed, once she made the bed she would be done and ready to begin her workday.

“I’m not sad. I’m...” said Sansa.

“What?” barked Arya.

“I get jealous when I see you two together. He’s more of a Stark than I’ll ever be, and when I see him with you that makes me feel bad, somehow. Like it’s just a matter of time before the rest of you decide to send me back south where I belong,” said Sansa, petting the otter fur offhandedly. She tucked it in the chest and closed the lid.

“Huh?” said Arya, with a look on her face that seemed to suggest maybe she was still in the vague confusion that comes with awakening.

“Never mind. I’m just feeling sorry for myself. I’ll have a chambermaid check your fire after supper from now on, and you’re welcome to sleep here whenever you like,” said Sansa, choking on the last words a bit because they were the right thing to say but also she sometimes had pictures in her head of how Sandor and Arya moved together and hunted together and killed together so easily. Someday they might find that a life made of that suited them both better than being chained to a chilly keep haunted by a fluttering old bat.

“Wait, you’re being...strange,” said Arya, her face wrinkled in concern. “If people are telling you secrets you have to tell me! You’re still the most gullible person I’ve ever seen and whatever they’re telling you is probably a setup and you wouldn’t even _know_ it.”

Sansa laughed without sound. “No, nothing like that,” she said, and then looking Arya dead in the eye she said, “It’s just I get jealous of you sometimes and last night...” she vaguely gestured at the bed and then fell silent because saying it out loud would be too much humiliation to bear.

Arya’s face broke into a great guffawing laugh. “Oh gods. What did I just say about you being too stupid for your own good?”

Sansa looked out at her beloved snows and the open shutter banging violently in the wind. What could she say in her own defense? There wasn’t an argument that came to mind that didn’t sound weak even to her ears.

“First of all,” stated Arya in a stern tone that belied her years, “You don’t get to be jealous of me, I’m jealous of you—that’s my thing, and you can’t have it. Your thing is cutting me out of stuff and telling me what I’m doing wrong. Second of all, he’s honestly disgusting, and I’ve never understood how you can stand to let him touch you. Third of all, even if I was interested in him like that, which—Seven hells I am not—he would never. He loves you so...”

Arya waved her hands in a way that meant to show she couldn’t find suitable language.

“...hard. You should see the way he looks at you when you’re not paying attention to him. It’s like he’s going to die, and then when you do look at him he also looks like he’s going to die, but in a different way. So pull yourself together, you’re _both_ pathetic, you’re perfect for each other, and if I ever have to talk to you about this again I swear I will just slap you across the face for wasting my time.”

_Wasting your time? What time? You don’t do anything around here except follow around the Hound and fight in the war._

Sansa sighed heavily. “Thank you,” she said, half in sincerity, half in mere courtesy. _She thinks he’s disgusting? She must be lying because anyone with eyes can see he’s the most—_

“You’re welcome. Now stop lurking around here waiting for him to come back,” commanded Arya.

“That’s not what I’m—“ began Sansa but before she finished Arya slammed the door behind her and she was alone again.

She made the bed then, and as she was tucking in the corners she found Sandor’s discarded tunic from last night under the bed. It smelled like him, and it ought to be washed. She inhaled deeply and then folded it up neatly and put it away in her wardrobe. _Mine._


End file.
